Previously we explored the topic of setting up a sandbox push notification server in Node.js. This featured a Mongodb instance to store users and device IDs, as well as endpoints to register users and send them the push notifications all at once. But what happens when you need to target individual devices instead of blasting your entire user base all at once? All of a sudden instead of processing one API call to send notifications to all of your users, you’re fielding multiple calls at once, possibly on the order of thousands of requests per second during peak user hours for your application. Fortunately, Node.js has built-in tools to help you scale your server.

The first issue we can tackle is breaking our Send endpoint out to work as a tool to send an individual push notification. We’ll assume in this case that the requests to this endpoint will come from another source with knowledge of the device Id and operating system to target. We’ll again use restify to set up our server:

We’ll skip over actually sending the push since we covered that in our previous post. Once we start the server, we can use the ApacheBench command line tool to load test it. In a separate terminal window, paste:

ab -p test.json -c 20 -t 10 http://localhost:8080/

Where test.json is a local json file with test data. This will open up 20 connections per second for 10 seconds on our server. When we run this we get an output of about 150 successful requests per second, but let’s see if we can do better. The cluster module ships with node and allows us to spin up a server for every CPU we have on our machine. In a separate file we can have a “master” node that spins up servers for every CPU we have on our machine:

On my personal machine, this spins up eight different instances of the push server, and when I run our same ab command, I’m now seeing over 500 requests per second. This works by running master once and then running it again every time cluster.fork() is called for as many CPUs as we have. If master.js is entered as a result of calling fork, the isMaster call will fail and it will spin up the server.

This is a simple example of the built-in power of Node.js to increase the scalability of your application and expertly handle any kind of heavy load your test servers might need to endure.

John Surface

Senior Developer

With a birth weight of just under seven and a half pounds, John has in less than three decades managed to gain thirteen stone and several years of experience as a full-stack and mobile engineer. He does his part to slow the spin of the earth spiraling out of control by creating robust backend solutions and intuitive cross-platform and native mobile applications.

The mobile dev world is buzzing with the Axway news that was revealed earlier today. To summarize the announcement:

The Axway Appcelerator Indie development tier is now free.

Hyperloop is now included with the Indie plan and is now free for all developers.

Appcelerator Arrow Builder is now called Axway API Builder and is also included in the (now free) Indie plan.

Hyperloop is Axway’s next-generation compiler that gives Titanium mobile developers full access to the native iOS, Android, and Windows APIs, all from within JavaScript.

Axway API Builder is a tool for creating, managing and orchestrating APIs. It allows developers to expose and control the flow of data from multiple sources using many built-in data connectors. API Builder is also extensible and allows devs to use Node.JS to create their own connectors, flows, endpoints, etc.

Quite simply this means that every mobile developer is only a few JavaScript lines of code away from any native API. Axway is opening the door for mobile developers to have free access to the Axway Appcelerator platform tools including Titanium, Hyperloop, API Builder and more!

Demand for training and developers with experience with both Hyperloop and Axway API Builder will undoubtedly increase as a result of these recent changes. Axway has strategically partnered with Shockoe to develop new training courses for both Hyperloop and Axway API Builder. Shockoe’s development experience with both of these products also enables us to continue giving our clients feature-rich experience, from apps to APIs.

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